Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for
Education Reform
Brotherly Love, Bad Schools: The battle to improve Philadelphia's education system.
by Pete Du Pont
Tuesday, November 6, 2001
Philadelphia has one of the worst school systems in the nation. Only 13% of high school juniors are able to read and understand a newspaper. Fifty-eight percent of its students fail reading and math; 80% score less than proficient. Fifty percent of the kids who start out in first grade drop out before graduating. Yet despite all this failure, only one in 500 Philadelphia teachers received a low performance rating last year.
Continuing the work of his predecessor, Tom Ridge, Gov. Mark Schweiker has prepared a plan to correct the district's massive educational failure. "The Philadelphia School District is hemorrhaging our children's futures. It is not an 'issue.' It is not a 'challenge.' It is a crisis," he says. It is a crisis that can be measured in lost opportunity: Two-thirds of prison inmates are high school dropouts; poverty rates are 10 times higher for high school dropouts; the unemployment rate for dropouts is twice the rate for young people with some college education.
The battle lines are drawn in Philadelphia. On one side are those who believe such catastrophic failure requires replacing the inept school bureaucracy with a different kind of leadership, its educational programs with better scholarship, its measurement of progress with more accurate and more demanding tests. They believe the management and operation of failed schools should be given to proven private-sector educators who can change what needs to be changed.
On the other side are those who, in Mr. Ridge's words, "prefer publicly operated schools that fail children to privately operated schools that serve them well." They include the Philadelphia Chapter of the NAACP and the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity. The Rev. Arthur White of the Pennsylvania State Baptist Convention, not one to shy away from ugly demagoguery, described the Schweiker plan as "a terrorist attack on our children's education."
Before he left to become the director of homeland security, Mr. Ridge commissioned a study of the Philadelphia school system by Edison Schools Inc., the private school-management company. Its devastating report was issued last week, concluding that while many urban school districts provide a poor education, "Philadelphia is among the worst." "Over the last decade," Edison notes, "the district's management has overseen the expenditure of more than $10 billion with no clear accountability for the results." It recommended that management of the schools be turned over to a private company.
Gov. Schweiker's plan would substitute new management for the Philadelphia School Board. The city's 60 worst schools would be run independently by a qualified education management organization--be a college, a nonprofit or Edison itself. The 30 to 40 best schools would be run as they are, with oversight from the new managers. The remaining 170 schools in the middle would receive new training for teachers, new textbooks and a consistent curriculum. There would be three math and reading curricula to choose from, instead of the 75 math and 100 reading programs now used in the schools system, so there can be some consistency of result.
Fifteen hundred "lead teachers" would be selected to provide instructional motivation and standards, and a uniform citywide discipline code would be established. Lead teachers would be paid an extra $7,500 per year, and successful school principals could receive cash bonuses up to 30% of their salary.
Implementing all the reforms would cost an additional $150 million annually--$70 million from the state, $70 million from the city and $10 million from the federal government.
What is upsetting the blinkered Philadelphia status quo is the very idea that Edison, or some company like it, would have the authority to run the city school system. Jobs are at stake, and patronage and politics, and all these things are more important to the establishment than better-educated students. That the teachers union would take such a position is bad enough; but for the NAACP to align itself with such shameful behavior is a betrayal of its constituency. If this is to be the governing philosophy of Philadelphia education, its children--the vast majority of whom are black--are doomed.
In fact, Edison has a very strong record in running successful schools. The company began its school management with four schools in 1995; it now manages 136 schools in 22 states. Seventy percent of Edison school students are low-income, and 64% are minority. A Rand study found that 84% of Edison schools are achieving higher academic levels than when they came under the company's management. Overall, Edison schools increased the percentage of students achieving standards and reduced the failure rate on tests by an average of six percentage points each in every year.
Would this kind of performance be good for the students of Philadelphia? Black and white, rich and poor Philadelphians would reply with a resounding "yes." Would Philadelphia's children get a better education and thus better lifetime opportunities? Of course. So after a protracted political struggle and a lot of lawsuits, the Schweiker/Ridge plan will likely be adopted.
If it succeeds in improving the education of poor urban kids in Philadelphia, it will spread to other cities and create opportunity for thousands of children there as well. So the battle for Philadelphia's schools is worth fighting.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears Wednesdays.
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